The Wild Book – Disability in Kidlit

In early-1900s Cuba, young Fefa is diagnosed with dyslexia – "word blindness" – and is given a blank book by her mother to practice her writing in.

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The Wild Book

Fefa struggles with words. She has word blindness, or dyslexia, and the doctor says she will never read or write. Every time she tries, the letters jumble and spill off the page, leaping away like bullfrogs. How will she ever understand them?

But her mother has an idea. She gives Fefa a blank book filled with clean white pages. Think of it as a garden, she says. Soon Fefa starts to sprinkle words across the pages of her wild book. She lets her words sprout like seedlings, shaky at first, then growing stronger and surer with each new day. And when her family is threatened, it is what Fefa has learned from her wild book that saves them.

Practical information

Author: Margarita Engle
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication year: 2012
ISBN: 9780547581316
Age category: middle grade
Disability portrayed: dyslexia
Genres: historical, verse

Author

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of verse books such as The Surrender Tree, Enchanted Air, Forest World, and Drum Dream Girl. Awards include the NSK Neustadt Prize, three Astrid Lindgren Award Nominations, a Newbery Honor, multiple Pura Belpré, Walter, Américas, Jane Addams, and International Latino Book Awards and Honors, as well as the Charlotte Zolotow, PEN USA, Golden Kite, Green Earth, Lee Bennett Hopkins, Arnold Adoff, and Claudia Lewis Awards, among others. Margarita served as the 2017-2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her most recent books include With a Star in My Hand, Dreams From Many Rivers, and Dancing Hands. Forthcoming books include Your Heart, My Sky and A Song of Frutas. Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives on the island. Margarita studied agronomy and botany along with creative writing, and now lives in central California with her husband.

My grandmother lived to nearly 104, but because of the early-twentieth-century medical misnomer, ‘word blindness,’ she always believed there was something wrong with her eyes. She never felt confident about her own letters, but she told me that having a poet in the family would be “lo ultimo” (the ultimate). Poetry has always been an essential part of Cuban culture, even in the countryside, even among poor farmers.

(Gathering Books, April 2012)